Addressing Climate Change through Mitigation and Adaptation

Climate change is a reality that is already having a measurable effect on forests, natural resources and people's livelihoods. During the last century, the earth is known to have warmed by about 0.7°C. Poor people in developing countries are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change because they often rely on agricultural and forest resources for their livelihoods. They live in marginal areas like flood plains and steep mountainsides, most likely to be affected by climate extremes.

There are two complementary approaches to addressing climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation deals with the causes of climate change: mitigation activities aim to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. REDD, with its focus on reducing emissions, is a mitigation activity. Given that deforestation and forest degradation release more carbon dioxide than the entire global gas-guzzling transport sector, mitigation of these emissions through REDD has huge potential to slow climate change.

Adaptation encompasses the changes that can be made in natural or human systems, which try to reduce the damage caused by climate change, or to exploit the benefits. Although forests can play a significant role in helping people adapt to climate change, much less attention has been paid to adaptation than to mitigation. And forests, too, need help to adapt to the changing climate. Tropical forests in some parts of the world are already affected, most obviously by changes in temperature and rainfall that are leading to a greater risk of fire. Climate induced shifts in bio-geographical zones endanger some species of wildlife and plants: the creation of wildlife corridors between large blocks of forest may be necessary to enable species to move to more suitable climates. At the local level forests provide ecosystem services and will be essential in maintaining people's environments and livelihoods as the climate changes.

A few countries already have climate change adaptation plans; very few of these consider the role of forests or integrate them with plans for other sectors such as water, agriculture or transport. But forests play a vital role, for example, in regulating water supplies: they stabilise watersheds and slow soil erosion, which is likely to be of even greater value as rainfall events become more intense. This protects infrastructure, such as hydroelectric power plants, from siltation. These kinds of linkages need to be to be explicitly recognised in climate change adaptation plans and acted upon.